PC Slower Than It Used to Be?
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchThe short answer: the developer behind the Git Cherry Tree client moved its UI from Tauri with React to Iced, a Rust GUI library. Under their heaviest diff workload, frame time dropped from 9–10 ms to 3–6 ms while scrolling, and Linux packaging became a single file they could hand to someone else. The gain was real but not dramatic, performance was not the main reason for the change, and the rewrite cost a much larger UI codebase and a long fight over binary size. The account is one developer’s experience with one application, not a framework benchmark.
Why the web UI was replaced
The developer did not describe the Tauri/React client as broken. It could render diffs of up to one million lines. Several problems built up over time, and the most important ones were not about raw rendering speed:
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- Inter-process communication for large data. Moving big payloads between the Rust backend and the web frontend was the most painful part (measurements are in the IPC section below).
- Image loading. Images had flicker and timing problems.
- Antivirus false positives. Launching browser-engine processes triggered antivirus warnings on some systems.
- Linux portability. The path to a usable Linux binary was, in the developer’s words, unsatisfactory.
The developer had earlier tried four or five Rust UI frameworks and found them hard to work with, so they chose React on Tauri. Later, Iced looked like the strongest Rust option they had tried, helped by a recent release. The post’s own summary of the performance question is blunt: “Performance: Not really, actually!”
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The numbers and what they can show
All figures below come from the developer’s own blog post. The post does not show a publication date, so read them as a snapshot of that version of the app. None comes from an independent or reproducible benchmark, and the post does not document a methodology detailed enough to repeat on other machines.
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| Measure | Prior Tauri/React UI | Iced UI | Qualification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frame time while scrolling the largest diffs | 9–10 ms per frame | About 3–6 ms per frame under load | Developer’s workload only; described as “faster than web, but not by an order of magnitude” |
| Opening a one-million-line diff | Not stated as an absolute figure | About 700 ms from click to visible display | The developer estimates Iced at roughly three to four times faster in this workload |
| UI implementation size | About 24,000 lines of TypeScript | About 45,000 lines of Rust | Measured at feature parity; the developer attributes part of the growth to vendored Iced elements and polished styling |
| Release binary size | About 15 MB (web version) | 15.3 MB after optimization | See the binary size progression below |
The frame-time gain is modest. The developer’s own wording is that the improvement was not an order of magnitude, and the post does not separate the effect of dropping React from the effect of changing the renderer or the data path. Anyone quoting these numbers as proof that Iced is faster than Tauri or React would be stretching the evidence.
Binary size: smaller first, then back to the starting point
The Iced binary did not shrink steadily. The developer’s sequence shows how quickly feature work erodes size gains:
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| Stage | Reported size | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Web version | 15 MB | Tauri/React build |
| First Iced build | 8 MB | Before most features existed |
| After adding features | 23 MB | Feature parity work |
| After optimization | 15.3 MB | Dependency review, custom syntax highlighting and icon work, Cargo feature changes, and compiling a custom standard library |
| Panics set to abort | About 11 MB | The developer’s hypothetical estimate, not the shipped result |
The lesson the developer draws is that a Rust rewrite does not automatically produce a smaller app. The size only came back down through deliberate work.
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The developer’s Windows testing of Tauri’s inter-process communication is the most concrete evidence in the post for why the data path mattered. These results are specific to that Windows setup and implementation:
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| Path | Reported figure | Observed behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Round-trip response | At least 3 ms | Latency was unbounded whenever the channel was busy |
| Tauri commands | About 2–10 MB/s | Throughput for ordinary command payloads |
| One large payload | About 100 MB/s | Transfer froze the UI while it ran |
| Internal download protocol | About 40 MB/s | The developer’s own protocol, outside Tauri commands |
In a design where large diffs must cross the boundary between backend and UI, this is the cost that most directly shapes the architecture. A UI that renders the diff itself avoids most of that traffic.
Linux: what changed and what did not
Tauri supports Linux. Its documentation names WebKitGTK 4.1 as the Linux requirement for Tauri v2, and it uses the operating system’s WebView, which on Linux is WebKitGTK. The developer’s problem was the build and portability story they had on their setup, not an absence of Linux support. Framing the switch as “Tauri cannot run on Linux” would misrepresent the account.
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Iced’s project README lists Windows, macOS, Linux, and Web support. It offers two renderers, wgpu for GPU rendering and tiny-skia as a software fallback, and the fallback is what let the developer’s app run without Vulkan.
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The developer reports the following result:
- They sent a single file under 20 MB to another person, and it ran on the Linux systems they tested.
- One of those systems was an older laptop with no Vulkan support, which the software fallback covered.
- The developer’s phrase “runs anywhere” describes their experience. It is not verified compatibility with every Linux distribution, GPU, or desktop environment.
What the rewrite cost
- More code. The Iced version was more verbose, and the developer says the amount of code surprised them. A commenter asked whether the growth came from message and update plumbing or from styling that CSS used to supply. The post answers only in part, pointing to vendored Iced elements and polished styling.
- No built-in animation system. Iced does not provide one, and the developer wrote a virtualized list themselves.
- Image loading was easier to control. The developer found it simpler to shape in Iced than in the web UI.
- Cursor and highlighting problems. These recurred during development.
- Windows startup and resizing. These required a custom rendering and window-startup sequence.
- Experimental toolkit. Iced’s documentation calls the library experimental and shows a 0.15.0-dev version line. Check the current release and known-limitations pages before committing.
Choosing between Tauri and Iced
The two approaches differ in what they ask of the team:
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| Factor | Tauri with a web frontend | Iced |
|---|---|---|
| UI technology | HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in an OS-provided WebView | Rust-only UI using the Elm-inspired model of state, messages, view, and update |
| Linux dependency | WebKitGTK 4.1 for Tauri v2 (per Tauri’s documentation) | wgpu renderer, or the tiny-skia software fallback |
| Executable size | WebView is dynamically linked, so it is not part of the executable | Everything compiled in; size depends on features and optimization |
| Skills needed | Web development plus Rust backend work | Rust, including ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, futures, streams, and trait bounds |
| Built-in widgets and animation | Whatever the web stack provides | Built-in widgets and async tasks; no animation system |
Before adopting either, work through these questions in order:
- Does the team already know Rust and web development? If not, Iced’s learning curve is a real cost.
- How complex is the UI? Custom panes, animations, and text-heavy views favour a web stack, while a focused, performance-critical viewer may favour a native toolkit.
- How much data crosses the UI-to-backend boundary? If large payloads are routine, the IPC figures above are the risk to test first.
- Which operating systems and distribution formats do you need? Test on the oldest hardware and the GPU-less configurations you expect to support.
- How much platform-specific work will you accept? Both paths involved significant per-platform fixes in this case.
- Is the toolkit stable enough for your schedule? Iced’s own label is experimental.
For Git Cherry Tree, the rewrite made sense for a Rust-fluent developer whose main pain was data transfer and Linux packaging. It is a poor template for a team that mainly needs a conventional, fast-to-build interface. Iced is not universally faster, and Rust does not guarantee a smaller binary.
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